The storage and retrieval of information has evolved from storing and retrieving information in textbooks and libraries, to storing and retrieving information from online networks such as the Internet. More particularly, the recent adoption and acceptance of online networks such as the Internet has led to a significant increase in the availability of information to the general public. Users frequently access information from the Internet using a personal computer (PC) and a modem. With such a computer, a user can search through the world's best libraries, connect into computer systems located anywhere on the planet, and read online magazines. Furthermore, users can shop for almost anything, located nearly anywhere in the world. However, this greatly expanded capability to retrieve information has led to a syndrome that can best be characterized as “sipping information from a fire hose”. As a result, users become overwhelmed and either fail to find the information they seek or they lose track of the information. As a result of losing track of the information, they cannot find it again at a later point in time. Several techniques have evolved in order to enable a user to collect desirable information from the Internet. However, each of these techniques falls far short of meeting the needs of information providers and information users.
More recently, the World Wide Web (WWW) has become the main vehicle for delivering information over the Internet to users. The World Wide Web (WWW) is a network system that enables easy access to distributed documents over the Internet using a client/server architecture. The World Wide Web provides an Internet facility that links documents locally and remotely. A Web document, referred to as a Web page, includes links in a page that let users jump from page to page (hypertext links) whether the pages are stored on the same server or on servers around the world. These Web pages are accessed and read via a Web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer.
A user often looks for information on the World Wide Web (WWW) during an online session using a Web search engine, such as AltaVista, Google, or Yahoo! In order to locate items of interest by way of hypertext links, many search engines gather information about content that is available on the Internet using Web crawlers. A Web crawler is a program that gathers information by following hypertext links that have been encountered by the program. The program sends a universal resource locator (URL), as well as document text, back to indexing software on the search engine for each encountered document. The indexing software extracts information from the documents. For example, words, document size and date of creation can be extracted by the indexing software. Such information has been organized into a database, typically based on the frequency of use of individual words present within a document. Accordingly, a keyword search that is implemented by a user with the search engine results in a database being searched, and a search result being generated without actually going directly to the World Wide Web (WWW). The search engine then generates a results page having hypertext links to the Web pages that were located in the database. A user then merely clicks on the link in order to go to the corresponding Web page. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) has merely increased the accessibility of large amounts of information to Internet users.
There is a need, therefore, to provide improvements in the way demand for information is identified, content is generated in response to a defined demand, and the way in which users access desired information.